Today I have awoken in a rather strange and pensive mood. As is my usual routine, I dropped the boy at music school and drove to my gym for a sauna and a jacuzzi. This is the one time during the week when I really get the opportunity to think about things without distraction (if you can call sitting in a jacuzzi whilst 20 primary school age kids have swimming lessons not a distraction).
It got me think back to my own days at St Vincents primary school. How things have changed. Swimming lessons then were terrifying. They took place in Mill Hill open air Swimming pool (probably around May but it always felt like winter in Siberia). We were forced to get in the water and then they'd throw something to the bottom. You had to dive down and get it. I don't know if anyone actually learned to swim. If they were like me they just developed an immense fear of water and all things to do with swimnming pools (I eventually learned to swim on my own aged 16).
Seeing the nice swimming instructors encouraging the kids in a nice warm pool, exemplified how much things have changed. Football at Finchley Catholic High meant cold showers with (I now suspect some of them were "not quite right") teachers watching to make sure we all had one. I've always loved football, but I've never seen the point of cold showers. They told us it was character building. It just put me off. Then there was music. At St Vincents this entailed buying a recorder, having a couple of half hearted lessons then it got forgotten. As to Finchley, the reason I asked to go there was they had "drum lessons" in the prospectus. On my first day I excitedly enquired how I signed up. They replied "Oh we stopped that a couple of years ago". I didn't really like music. My best mate Brian Shillibeer had a great voice and was selected by Mr Turner for the choir. This was a special elite. Brian got to sing at Covent Garden. Mr Turner had a deep love of classical music and the boys in the choir got many special priveliges. Sadly Brian never continued his singing career, although his younger brother Johnny did. Sadly I sing like deranged hog, so this was never really an option. For me music lessons were all about music I didn't like and things I didn't want to do. At the time popular music was considered "beyond the pale".
Then there was schoolwork. Especially at Primary school, being dyslexic in the 1960's & 1970's was not great. The word for dyslexia then was "thick". I've discussed a few times here my experiences, but I've never much discussed the strategy I used to deploy at St Vincents to deal with it. By the time we were in the junior classes (years 4-6 in todays terms) I decided that, unless it was raining, it was better to get sent out of class than to actually be in it. The junior 2 & 3 classes were portacabins. If you got sent out, you could sit around and observe all of the activity going on. I have vivid memories of taking crusts in from my breakfast so I could feed the birds when I got sent out. I think the teachers eventually cottoned on to the fact that I enjoyed gettintg sent out, because they then started to make me stand at the front of the class with my arms raised in the air.
Another feared activity from Finchley was the dreaded cross country run. Wednesday afternoon was sports day. If this was football, it was OK (showers excepted). Once a month we'd have a cross country run. I was never a great sprinter, so I never took much interest in running. Once in the fourth year, I decided that I was going to really try for the cross country run. This was when I found that I was an OK distance runner. I really went for it and narrowly missed coming second in a sprint finish. Given that there were 180 boys in our year, this was a good achievement. I was pretty proud of it, but the games teacher assumed I'd cheated and disqualified me. That was the beginning and end of my career as a cross country runner. I decided that it really wasn't worth the effort. Given my complete lack of training and general effort, I've often wondered how I might have done if I'd bothered. When I was 25 I decided to run a marathon and started really training properly. My target was to run it in under 3 hours. I was well into my schedule when I got run over and that was the end of that.
When I was 14 I really felt very despondent about everything. I wasn't enjoying school, I didn't really have any interests and I wasn't very sociable given that my main hobbies were causing trouble, being objectionable and winding people up. Then a remarkable thing happened. I discovered punk rock. Straight away I understood the nihilism. Strangely, just realising that other people felt the same made me feel a million times better. Strangely this improved my school grades as well.
2 comments:
Well, as another survivor of the St Vincent's swimming regime - and like you this experience nearly put me off learning to swim at all - I have to say I am sure the lessons were in the middle of winter, or it certainly felt like it. As I have said before, I can remember it was so cold, your limbs would turn blue ... when you got back to school, the scary Sister Gabriel would then ensure that you drank the revolting school milk in those peculiar pyramid shaped cartons which she had thoughtfully warmed up on the radiators. How we didn't die of hypothermia or whatever is the reverse of Pasteurisation, I will never understand. Thank God for Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher - the one positive achievment of her career ...
Oh joy.May I sugest, yes it was dire at the time,and I read with pure joy the Blog and comment What a life!! However is it not still the same? if different listen to the kids comments! I recently said to a teacher at an unbelievably well equipt school, I wish we had had these facilities available Yes he replied studiously We can now turn out First class idiots after a bad day i like to think. just a thought Maybe it was character building?
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